Yesterday I attended SAP Inside Track Washington DC in the SAP Offices of the Ronald Reagan Building. A big note of appreciation to john.astill and martin.lang (and Martin's team) for setting up this day. I attended as there were so many topics at SAP TechEd that I missed that were being covered at this event. So to me it is SAP TechEd content for "free".
michael.golz , SAP Regional CIO of North America, conducted the keynote for SAP Inside Track Washington DC.
Pictured: Mike Golz, SAP - Photo by Martin Lang
He reviewed what SAP IT is doing and what they plan to do. Below are some of my notes.
SAP has 18K Blackberries with 150 Playbooks, 18K iPads
They use Afaria as their mobile device management solution
They have a self-service process with a mySAP device web page which is a 5 step process, enroll device, register with the platform. They install the Afaria client which pushes apps to iPad, and this helps manage the environment.
He said they went from0 to 1000 devices when the iPad was launched
Regarding the Windows 8 Pro release and the Windows 8 phone Mike thinks it will be big but the consumer decides
Over 50 mobile apps are life in SAP, they become preferred way of access to internal systems say
He said they certify devices as come out. They certify for "bring your own device". If an employee has a personal device, they connect, and still certify that device type meets standards.
Copying iTunes, he said they have a mobile genius bar for mobile solution centers.
For applications, SAP IT started with Mobile BI, using that for sales pipeline information for sales that generate immediate demand. He said Mobile BI was the first time people at SAP were using the system the first time directly.
He said many high level executives no longer want PowerPoints or Excel spreadsheets but they want to see the data live. He said this lowers cost and improves quality.
He said the common question is when will we have one device; he believes they will leave laptop when as soon as you can do an Excel pivot table…
SAP CIO office installed early versions Hana. They replicated CRM in Hana and used BusinessObjects Explorer via the SLT to replicate. They installed CO-PA accelerator, says it is straightforward and easy to implement. From the business side, it used to take 26 hours to do the CO-PA run – now it shortened in just a few seconds/minutes – used to take 3 business days and now down to 4 hours.
They also run BW on Hana (as a database). He said some data that was in BW will now stay in ERP system – if transaction system can do things on the fly via Hana. An example is the CO-PA report which used to be in BW now it is back in transactional system/
He said CRM on Hana is planned for Q1 of next year. ERP on HANA they are looking at the middle of the next year
What was nice is he said that they were not able to discuss these things three years ago. Kudos to the SAP CIO's IT team for sponsoring this event.
Other
During this day, we tried out the SCN Connect application that John discussed in this blog. The purpose of this application as explained to me by anita.yuen of the SCN Marketing team was to "continue the conversation" after you meet people at events. Since I don't carry business cards, this works for me.
John explained that the QR scan code was not working and they have submitted another fix to the app store. I was able to connect to people via this application. Sanket Fridoya of the SAP IT team had a discussion where he showed how he built this application. There was an open discussion about how to improve the application and John said they are open to more feedback.
During this session, Martin Lang had to return and tweeted this from the train:
@sanketfirodiya @johna69 @tpowlas could we create such tweets: twitter.com/tpowlas/status… automatically in the app after following someone?
— MartinLang (@MartinLang) December 7, 2012
So as an example, if I follow anita.yuen on SCN using SCN device, a tweet could be generated "I am now following @anitawky on #SCN"
What a great crowd-sourcing idea.
Summary
There are more sessions covered, a separate blog is coming. Special thanks to our virtual attendees fred.verheul somnath.manna rich.heilman susan.keohan and any others I may have missed.
Thank you again John Astill, Martin Lang, the SAP IT team and attendees for a great day. Here is the tweetdoc link for the tweets during the event: http://www.tweetdoc.org/View/60389/SAP-Inside-Track-Washington-DC
Special thanks to our sponsors at SAP Press (www.sap-press.com) for providing great books for a free drawing:
Pictured on the right is John Astill, with Geoff Darnell, lucky winner of Ingo Hilgefort's Integrating SAP BusinessObjects BI4.x Platform with NetWeaver
I won Mobilizing your Enterprise with SAP. Thank you @SAPPRESS
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